Multicasting enables a content distributor to distribute a single copy of media content, such as a movie, to multiple client nodes concurrently. Multicasting therefore consumes less bandwidth of the network than would be required to separately unicast the content to each client node over the network. To further reduce the bandwidth required to distribute video media content, the content is frequently compressed, or encoded, prior to distribution over the network and is then uncompressed, or decoded, at the client node prior to presentation of the video content on a display.
There are certain events associated with a client node that is receiving a multicast video stream of a program that cause a distributor of the multicast video stream to begin unicasting a video stream of the program. In such situations, it may be possible to unicast the program using a different compression format than that used by the multicast video stream of the program, and thereby gain advantages associated with the use of the different compression format for the unicast stream.